The recruiter asked for my availability four months after I applied and then scheduled the first technical interview. They didn't provide any information on what would be covered.

I woke up at 7:30 AM for an 8 AM interview with two Data Engineers from Sweden. They proceeded to ask about programming and concurrency theory, with very little focus on SQL and databases.

I asked for clarification on the process, to which they replied that they didn't even know this was for an internship position and were simply asking full-time questions. It was obvious they were reading questions from an internal list.

It was an appalling and disappointing experience, mainly because the job requirements did not align at all with the questions asked during the interview.

I've interviewed at Amazon and Meta and obtained internship positions at these companies, which offer significant incentives. They only asked about SQL and Python.

In comparison, Spotify offers a Software Engineering position with a focus on data, rather than a Data Engineering position. They asked many questions on programming theory, how to use tools I haven't worked with before, and even concurrency.

This doesn't seem like an adequate Data Engineering internship interview, and the position should be marketed or described better.

P.S.: Please, no nonsensical responses from the company. There are no excuses for this kind of treatment from such a large company. Take responsibility and do better.

Also, Spotify CEO: "We have no time for entitled egos." Ridiculous.

1. CAP Theorem

2. Time complexity for different data structures

3. Concurrency, threads, and processes

4. How to write SQL queries in Scala

5. How to perform the equivalent of SQL queries in Excel

6. Difference between synchronous and asynchronous API calls

7. Hadoop & MapReduce

8. Difference between imperative and functional programming languages

9. SQL query to select the count of users that played a track

10. Garbage collector

11. Static vs. dynamic

12. Hash tables, collisions, and constant time extraction